I try not to blog about stuff that comes through the Reuters Oddly Enough RSS feed because it’s easier to just get it straight from them but the last couple of days have seen some pretty odd stories about Germans come through. Today’s was a german man who was refused a passport because he was dead. Apparently his blind ex-wife had reported him as having died in an explosion but had to get her mother to identify the body due to her lack of sight. I guess the husband hadn’t spent enough time with his mother in law. I should also point out that the article doesn’t actually mention he was refused the passport but one would hope that he was at least initially…. And of course now that I reread it a little more carefully – he might have been russian instead of german. They’re both north of here and substantially colder so you can understand the mistake….

Well I figure if you’re going to do something you may as well do it properly and I’ve been getting into the whole PGP thing lately. The trouble is noone has signed my key making it pretty much worthless. I’m also a long way away from everyone I know who uses PGP and fate seems to work against me when I’m closer to them. Bertrand was in Australia recently and even in Brisbane, unfortunately I was over in San Francisco (btw Bertrand if you manage to read this, my old email is offline at the moment so I can’t find your contact details to let you know that I’m back in the country but I figure you’ve moved on from Brisbane anyway). Meanwhile, when I was in San Francisco I missed the train and didn’t make it to the first Apache gathering which had people present who used PGP. I made it to the second but I don’t think anyone there used PGP so there was no key signing done. So I figure I should check out a certificate authority and at least get them to sign my key. CACert is the new, free CA service and since I think it’s about time someone provided a free CA I wanted to support it by getting involved and if the service stacks up with money. It seems however, that there’s no trusted authorities in Brisbane yet. Fortunately they do have a more complex process involving faxing IDs around and finding a couple of lawyers, accountants or bank managers to verify your identity. Since I happen to know a few lawyers and accountants (oh, the company I keep….) that might just work out. So if you’re a lawyer and see me coming with a bunch of paper work, you know what it’s about. With all the viruses impersonating people these days, not to mention actual identify theft (which I’ve personally been a victim of before, though fortunately there were no serious consequences), it’s beginning to get more and more important that your identify can be accurately identified online. The first step is for lots of geeks to get involved, then for more email clients to have builtin support for PGP and make it easy, then we should see much more widespread adoption. Hopefully at some point it will be so ubiquitous that ISPs can refuse to relay email unless it’s signed with a registered PGP key and spam is no longer a problem (though email server resources would be under much higher load so it’s unlikely to actually be done). Client side filters would definitely be an option though.

Technology is wonderful sometimes but it can have serious drawbacks. Having recently moved house and finally managed to remember my new address and find out what my new phone number is I set out to send my new contact details around to friends and family. It occurred to me that attaching a vcard with all my details might make life easier for some people to get in sync with my new details. The trouble is if you attach a file to an email people inevitably think it’s important and just have to open it. So my email ends with the words:

Via Reuters:

A German man reported a female chat-line worker to police after facing a phone bill for $7,244 following an all-night flirt session with her She called him unsolicited and told him to call her back saying it would be “a cheap rate”. My favorite quote:

The man said they talked about far more than just sex Suuuure.

This is pretty scary. Read it, contemplate it and remember it when you next come to vote. UPDATE: It would help to format the HTML correctly on the link so that browsers actually pay attention to it…. Sorry about that and that’s to the anonymous commenter that pointed out the problem.

John O’Conner raises a good point – Opensource projects tend to have poor documentation. Java tends to have good documentation (IMO, the best documentation I’ve seen for a programming library). Will Opensourcing Java reduce the quality of it’s documentation? The obvious response is that Sun and IBM etc will still be investing so their doc writers can continue writing the documentation just like now. Except that most of the documentation for Java is written by the same people who write the actual code within Sun – at least that’s the impression I get. If people outside of Sun are writing code it would be up to them to document it – how well would that be kept up if there was no performance review checking up on them?

Once again the Mac world has led the way in pioneering new technology – this time in an area that they are traditionally criticized for the lack of software options: security exploits. Close on the heals of the Safari URL exploits, Mozilla caught up with a shell: exploit and now at long last Microsoft catches up. (Okay it was a few days ago, but that was when I started writing this entry.) My favorite comment from the slashdot thread would have to be:

While I was away in San Francisco, my house mate was lugging all my furniture into my new house. The new place is a huge 5 bedroom place on the top of the secondary peak of Mt Gravatt so it has brilliant views ranging from the port of Brisbane and beyond over the sea right around over ANZ stadium and way off into the distance over south Brisbane. Absolutely stunning. The floors are all beautiful polished wood and the whole house is very open and spacious. I’ve still got a lot of stuff packed in boxes in the garage but I’m reasonably set up now. We put in an order for DART ADSL yesterday so hopefully that won’t take too long to come through. TV reception around here is nonexistent (the TV broadcast towers are all on the highest mountain in the city which happens to directly line up such that the mountain we’re on is in the way). All in all though I’m very happy with the new joint.

So I’m on my way home from JavaOne and thought I’d take the final opportunity to use my T-Mobile wifi account. The coverage in SF airport was great until the whole network suddenly disappeared. So much for that. Now I’m in LA airport and the coverage is awful. My flight leaves from one end of the terminal and the wireless access is at the other end. Oh well, I have another 45 mins to kill before boarding so I can sit here and rant a while longer yet….

I’ve been looking into creating an editor for the JDNC XML descriptor file using EditLive! for XML partly as a test case for ELX using a big and complex schema, partly as a way to contribute to that community and partly as a marketing effort (it would make for a good example of what you can do with ELX). Sadly, the JDNC schema is completely invalid so it causes a whole heap of errors to be output by Xerces and finally causes Xerces to throw an ArrayOutOfBoundsException. Since we use the schema heavily and use Xerces to parse it, that makes the JDNC schema pretty much a no-go for ELX right now (not to mention making it completely useless for anything else). I’ll have to check a few things before I can be completely sure it’s the JDNC schema that’s causing the problems (obviously the exception from Xerces should never happen either) but I’m pretty sure it’s missing some imports for schemas it references. The schema also seems to override types in a way that isn’t supported (attempting to change mixed content types to element only).

What the hell is a kiss and ride? I’ve heard of park and rides where you can drive a short distance from home then park and catch a train the rest of the way but a kiss and ride? I guess it’s a drop off point where you get your husband/wife (or in San Francisco your boyfriend) to drive you a short distance from home and then you catch the train and they drive home again. Still wouldn’t it be easier to call it a drop off point? Is it really that inconceivable that someone might be dropped off by someone they don’t want to kiss? Anyway, I’ve got to go find a good looking girl to give me a lift to the train station tomorrow…..

(I wrote this Thursday night but didn’t have net access on the train to post it) I finally managed to catch up with a number of Apache people tonight at the Thirsty Bear (rest assured the bear is not quite as thirsty after our beer drinking efforts). Afterwards we picked up the two new IBM servers that have been sitting at Collab.Net and deposited them into the cage at the colo facility. Since I’m not a server guy at all this is one of very few times I’ve been in a server room and the first chance I’ve had to see the Apache server setup (there’s now another colo in Europe somewhere I believe). It’s pretty small and simple but seems to do the job quite well which is what really matters. Apparently the Technorati servers are in the same colo and they look a heck of a lot more impressive with a few racks full of servers and cables going everywhere. Either way it was great to finally meet a few Apache developers and put some faces to names. My description of myself as “the tall redhead” seemed to be effective as people walked straight in the door and introduced themselves to me. Sometimes it pays to stand out a bit I guess.